15 March 2018
The History of St Helens.
St Helens takes its name from a chapel, which was first mentioned in 1552. It was built where the road from Ormskirk to Warrington crossed the road from Prescot to Ashton. At that time the area that is now St Helens was divided into four townships. They were Eccleston, Windle, Parr and Sutton. A school was held in a chapel until 1670 when a man named John Lyon left money to be built next door. Though the area was mainly agricultural, coal mining was carried out as early as the sixteenth century. The town of St Helens grew up because it had rapidly available supplies of coal and sand for making glass and it had good communications.
St Helens also benefited from the rapid growth of Liverpool from the late seventeenth century onward. Liverpool was a market by itself, but it was also a convenient port form goods of St Helens. In 1746, St Helens was connected to Prescot and Liverpool by a turnpike road (a road that you had to pay to use). In 1753, the turnpike road was connected to Aston. Glass making was carried on in St Helens by the early eighteenth century, but in the late eighteenth century it was boomed. In 1826, a person called William Pilkington founded a glass works in St Helens.
What do you think about the history of St Helens?